Google Analytics can offer all sorts of crucial information about your web traffic:
How people are finding you.
What content is popular.
Whether you’re getting more Traffic than last year.
You know all this. And yes, it’s all important.
But it doesn’t tell you who visited your site.
The who is extremely important.
For B2B companies, it’s borderline essential.
Who visits your website tells you whether you’re attracting quality traffic to your site.
For example, consider one of our current customers, a B2B marketing agency that wants to attract its ideal clients: mid-sized technology and marketing companies.
We’ll call them TrendSetters (they asked us not to use their real name for this article).
For the owners of TrendSetters, generating “quality” web traffic means:
Attracting website visitors they can identify and follow up with (e.g., “leads”).
Attracting enough leads that their sales pipeline is always full.
For TrendSetters, collecting 3-5 highly-qualified leads per month is sufficient to keep its sales pipeline full.
The key — according to the agency — is to attract the right kind of companies. That way, they’re not generating leads that would never be a good fit for their agency.
This is where Leadfeeder comes in.
Using a site visitor’s IP address, Leadfeeder can identify which businesses are visiting TrendSetters’ site.
By adding Leadfeeder data to what they already knew from Google Analytics, TrendSetters analyzed its content and promotion channels to see if they were attracting the right kind of traffic.
As we’ll discuss in this post, they were doing an okay job attracting prospects from their target audience. But there were also opportunities to improve.
What follows is the strategy TrendSetters used to finetune its content strategy to ensure they were attracting and engaging with ideal clients.
(Note: Want to run a similar content audit for your website? See who is showing interest by visiting your site using Leadfeeder. Try it free in minutes.)
1. They Added “Who?” to “How Many?”
Before using Leadfeeder, TrendSetters tracked how many people visited their website. They got that data from Google Analytics.
This past March, TrendSetters’ website saw 5,992 users, which they found in Google Analytics under Audience > Overview.
From that traffic, they generated four highly qualified leads. They know this because the leads came to them, filled out their lead form, and initiated the conversation.
What they didn’t know is what kinds of content drew these *specific *leads to their site — or how to get more leads like them.
In Leadfeeder, TrendSetters used the “All Leads” report to get a first glimpse at who was visiting its site.
The “All Leads” report is the first report users see after logging into Leadfeeder.
Instead of anonymous Google Analytics data, they now had this:
At a high level, this was its first data about whether they were ‚Äî in general¬†‚Äî attracting the right kinds of traffic to the site.
Now they needed to know if these companies were the right size and coming from the right industry.
2. They Looked at Traffic by Industry and Size
If you’re looking for data in Google Analytics about the companies and individuals who visit your site, there’s not much to see.
For example, Google Analytics can show traffic by country and language. That’s interesting — but not really helpful for TrendSetters, which has clients from all over the world.
Google Analytics also has several beta reports that provide some *data about demographics and interests. But like everything in Analytics, it’s anonymous data, focused on what people *did after they got to the website, not who they are.
Leadfeeder was able to provide a better picture of the company’s site traffic for this B2B agency, by getting way more specific.
For example, by using Filters in Leadfeeder, TrendSetters sorted its traffic to identify visitors from computer software and marketing companies with more than ten employees.
This strategy produced a prioritized list of companies within its target market that had visited its site. The most engaged visitors — those that were the most active on their site — were sorted to the top.
From this data, TrendSetters found that they were — in fact — attracting visits from companies in its target market, which was great news! They were attracting companies such as Netflix, Zillow, and IDEO.
Engagement, however, was another story.
3. They Analyzed Interest and Engagement
Using Google Analytics, TrendSetters tracked which pages were the most popular and the most engaging.
They did this by tracking pageviews and average time on page in the Content > All Pages report.
This data told them which content was the most engaging on its site.
With Leadfeeder, they were able to uncover similar engagement data, but about the individual companies visiting its site.
Were the companies from their target audience the ones that were most engaged on their website?
In Leadfeeder, TrendSetters filtered traffic to identify companies that had spent longer than 15 minutes on their website.
These results included many companies outside its target industries and, unfortunately, did not return many of the companies they were most excited about from the “All Leads” report.
Using this information, TrendSetters told us they were able to start analyzing why its content may be attracting less qualified leads, which topics are getting engagement from better leads, and, thus, better prioritize the content strategy going forward.
(Note: See which content attracts your ideal customers using Leadfeeder. Try it free in minutes.)
4. They Investigated the Value of Acquisition Channels
If their ideal prospects weren’t the most engaged visitors on the site—what were they doing?
To answer that question, TrendSetters looked at Acquisition Channels to see how they performed.
In Google Analytics, you can see acquisition channels under Acquisition > All Content > Channels.
This will tell you where your traffic comes from, but it doesn’t tell you which channels are doing the best job of pulling in traffic from your target audience.
That’s important because it might not be the one with the highest numbers.
TrendSetters’ Google Analytics data told them the majority of its traffic came from organic searches, the GrowthHackers community, Twitter, and Facebook. They also saw that visitors were being drawn in by their online blog and case studies, which they regularly promoted to attract new leads.
Using LeadFeeder, they explored which businesses were coming in from GrowthHackers and who was reading their case studies.
It’s here TrendSetter found new goals.
They discovered that a lot of the traffic from GrowthHackers, as well as readers of its case studies, came from outside its ideal industries (and, interestingly enough, outside the U.S.).
When they looked at the pages viewed by some of their ideal clients, they discovered those prospects were much more interested in the blog than they were case studies. They also tended to visit the site directly or via a Google organic search.
TrendSetters’ Takeaway from the Analysis
What did TrendSetters conclude after conducting this analysis?
By adding Leadfeeder data to Google Analytics, they determined three things:
Certain channels help drive traffic to the site, but they didn’t necessarily convert as well.
Its target audience wasn’t engaging with the content they suspected would pull them in: case studies.
They should invest more heavily in strategic blog posts with well-placed CTAs.
This information gave TrendSetters important information about how to attract more clients moving forward.
Those strategic insights?
They would never have realized them if they had only relied on Google Analytics.